Friday, June 12, 2015

Sci-Fi Roleplaying: Play on Target Ep. 42

I'm a little late with this, but last week Play on Target released a new episode covering Science-Fiction gaming. This complements our previous show on Star Wars. We've discussed particular genres before: Supers and Horror. Throughout you'll hear and interesting shift as some of our love/hate with this genre comes through. Or maybe attraction/frustration might be a better way to put that. This episode ended much longer than we expected.
Part of that comes from a split in the middle of the recording session. We had to catch up with the second half after a week break. It might be hard to notice over my domination of the conversation...

Since this is my 993rd post I’m filling
these entries with countdowns as we head to 1000, therefore....

EIGHT THOUGHTS ON SCI-FI ROLEPLAYING

The Philip K Dick Problem: We talk a ton about sources in
our discussion, mostly novels and some of the big property
series (BSG, Star Trek). I’m not sure exactly why, but we rely more on touchstones here than in our other genre episodes. That poses a problem for me; if I had to pick my favorite sci-fi author it’d be
either Philip K. Dick or Howard Waldrop. On the one hand you’ve got surreal,
psycho-social spec-fi and on the other you’ve got mostly dense, alt-history
short stories. I’m not sure I could do either of those justice at the table,
even with something like Shock. Maybe one of Waldrop’s frames could work for a
one-shot, but it'd be challenging to bring the twist.

The Polemical Posit: Shock’s an interesting game which puts the social
and philosophical implications of science fiction at the forefront. It’s easy
to forget how much science-fiction literature addresses these
issues, across the spectrum. Heinlein, Brunner, Russ, Delany, Le Guin, and many more
have offer rich settings and stories delving into those questions instead of just space-ships and laser guns. So why don’t we have more of
these ideas in games? Like games, most pop-culture sci-fi addresses these themes only
loosely or in snippets (Black Mirror for example). The same seems to hold true
for sci-fi rpgs. The obvious answer is that games focus on escapism. Is that the
case, or is there more to it?

The Gender Divide: I have a goofy memory of being certain as a kid that boys read
sci-fi and girls read fantasy. I’m not sure where I got that. My sister read
voraciously and omnivorously. She always went three or four times as fast and I ran through books rapidly. I think I wanted to
differentiate myself from her, so I created this split in my head. I'd probably
seen her reading a fantasy series. So I worked through Asimov, Herbert, Niven,
and so on. But at some point I shifted; I started enjoying more marginally
sci-fi books like Moorcock’s "Cornelius" volumes, Lem’s Cyberiad, Silverberg’s
Lord Valentine’s Castle. That eventually led to fantasy books that sucked me in, mostly notably Tanith Lee's work.

The Power Supremacy: Weirdly I left off from our recording the sci-fi gaming I’m most comfortable with: superhero games. In my Superhero History lists, I talked
about the supers sub-genre that aims for a “realism.” It eschews
magic and the supernatural. Where that appears, it becomes a kind of
Hyper-Science (Supreme Power, Warren Ellis’ Wildstorm work or the explanation
of Asgard in the recent Marvel films). My two longest-running superhero
campaigns had strictly “scientific” rationales for powers. In one, a PC claimed
to have magic and the others continually joked about that. In rpgs, several
games explicitly take this approach for very different results: Aberrant,
Underground, eCollapse. In fact, these games all share a tone: focusing
on the impact of such powers on the world.

The Reese's Collision: On the other hand, I can handle fantastic elements in my
superheroes (I dig Astro City and the DC Universe for example). But usually I’m not
so fond of sci-fi in my fantasy. I’ve never been a big fan of the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks mix of things. These kinds of revelations have undercut my
enjoyment of books like Tepper’s “True Game” series and Wurts’ Stormwarden. In rpgs, even if the GM
wants to have those ancient lost technologies, it shouldn’t break the fiction
at all. In fact, I think it’s better if the players remain unaware or uncertain
of that. All of this may explain why Spelljammer leaves me cold.

The ET Paradox: Here’s another genre question: where do modern conspiracy games fall on the sci-fi continuum? Hidden Invasion, for example, which has the PCs fighting back against an alien assault. Strangely, that’s the only one I can think of. Most of the other games in the genre add in magic and fantastical elements: Conspiracy X, Dark*Matter, Over the Edge. There’s almost the sense that just sci-fi isn’t enough to hold the players’ attention or give them enough choices. They might be right given the modest success of modern sci-fi conspiracy shows (New War of the Worlds, Dark Skies, The Invaders).

The Mecha Maneuver: While skip over it in the episode, except for our Robotech
digression, I don’t think you can overstate the impact of manga and anime
on science-fiction gaming. Cyberpunk may have begun influenced by Gibson’s
work, but it quickly absorbed the style elements of Bubblegum Crisis and Appleseed.
That’s spilled over into many other sci-fi sub-genres. We wouldn’t have
Mechwarrior & Heavy Gear, Teenagers from Outer Space, Double Cross,
Cthulhupunk, and a host of other games without it. Or at least they wouldn’t
look the same. Beyond design elements, anime offered an approach which hand-waved
science while embracing “Science” as a theme.

The Ego Principle: I can pick three pure science-fiction games/settings I’d
run today. Ashen Stars would be top on that list, albeit with a seriously
reduced and condensed skill list. I like the concept of “problem-solvers” for
hire from that. The abandoned space setting presented makes sense and has lots of room.
Second would be Fringeworthy, done straight with questions of exploration,
contamination, and interaction with unusual societies. That game came out well
before Stargate and has almost exactly the same premise. Finally, I’d probably
run Star Wars if push came to shove. I’m leaving out sub-genre games here- I
can think of some Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic, Cyberpunk, or Supers games I’d like
to run.

If you like RPG Gaming podcasts, I hope you'll check it out.
We take a focused approach- tackling a single topic each episode. You can
subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the podcast's page at www.playontarget.com.